Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy "Theatrical
archaeologist extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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Indians |
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Abuses of
Enchantment Asking just such questions in 1968, Arthur Kopit’s Indians was nominated for both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The play combines a classical tragic hero’s quest with a Wild West Show to create a fever-dream of a play, where realities elide from one into another, the star both lives and dies to perform, and ghosts walk the stage from brassy start to silent end. A synopsis:
William Frederick Cody is only too pleased to return
from—well, a ghost town—to present his famous touring
show, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” And yet, the limits
on this engagement are formidable. Prompted by a
faceless voice and haunted by the specter of Chief
Sitting Bull, Bill alternately performs his show and
revisits the parts he played in the inexorable
expansion of the United States across the North
American continent in the 19th century…an expansion
that all but exterminated the buffalo and the native
people whose way of life depended upon them. Hunting
with a Russian Grand Duke, performing with Wild Bill
Hickok for President Grant, facing Geronimo in a lion
cage, emceeing for Annie Oakley, testifying at Senate
hearings on Indian grievances, and walking the frozen
field of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Bill sees
triumph after triumph turn to nightmare as he looks
with new clarity on the story of his celebrated life. Anti-Hero’s Journey In that fun house, Bill becomes the American qua American—talented, earnest, and infatuated with his abilities—discovering that he acts irresponsibly, even nefariously, and always naively. Worse, he recognizes not only his betrayal and sacrifice of those he calls friends, but also the compromise of the very values he thought he was promoting. If Kopit’s
critique of US hegemony is plain, it is not naïve. The
play never doubts the inevitability of a
technologically sophisticated culture’s expansion
across a continent rich in prized natural resources,
facing no coordinated resistance from an
uncomprehending people. The Native Americans did not
see the value in arable soil; they did not prize the
precious metals beneath it; they did not see land as
something that could be owned. The settlers saw mile
upon mile for expansion and profit. There was no
contest. All Enemies,
Foreign and Domestic A document of
cultural collision, Indians speaks to nearly
every headline in today’s news. At home, the play is
about struggles to acknowledge that black lives
matter, to preserve or remove memorials, to protect
water resources and sacred lands of indigenous people,
to secure immigrant rights, and to “return” to an
imaginary time when a more comfortable order seemed to
reign. It is about embracing mythologies sold by
celebrities as if they were the very core of our
personal triumphs and manifest destinies. And, as the
habits of power do not know international boundaries,
it is about the dismayingly long list of
disenfranchised and demonized communities around the
world, where those who strive to assert or maintain
power characterize whole populations as dangerous
menaces, be it on the basis of ethnicity, religion,
nationality, gender, sexuality, or race. Big Tent A play about
self-awareness and distraction; about a lost people
and their jejune conquerors; about injuries from which
we do not recover; Indians continues
Metropolitan’s 26th season: the Season of
Resilience.
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